Here are a few examples of English words, greetings and phrases that would have been used by the Pilgrims. Practice them at home and you could talk like a Pilgrim too! Here are some old words and phrases to amaze your friends and the audience when talking about the seventeenth century in Living History and elsewhere. Take a page out of history with these historical exclamations, or “minced oaths” as they’re sometimes called, and spice up your daily speech. In Old and Middle English it was unexceptional to negate more than one element of a sentence, and this remained down to the early seventeenth century, subsequently becoming rare or nonstandard. Huzza: Said to have been originally the cry of the huzzars or Hungarian light horse; but now the national shout of the English, both civil and military; to give three cheers being to huzza thrice. The grammatical and orthographical conventions of literary English in the late 16th century and the 17th century are still very influential on modern Standard English. Seventeenth-century people in both old and New England had a conception of speech very different from our own. To them, speech seemed inherently more mysterious, dangerous, and “real” than it does today. A late 17th century alternative to swearing, similar in meaning to ‘devil’, ‘damn’, or ‘cursed’, deuce (or deuced) comes from rolling a two in dice, the lowest possible score, and refers to less-than-ideal things, or a sense of frustration in something. Old English terms that express emotions, sounds, etc. as exclamations. The following 31 pages are in this category, out of 31 total. Somewhere in a fantasy version of the Caribbean during the 1490s, a sword fight ensues twixt two exclamation- and interjection-loving roisterers. See what kind of interesting and archaic words they use to express how they feel in the examples below.